//Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people were once again subject to the whims of homophobia and religious and cultural extremism this week, thanks to a United Nations vote that removed “sexual orientation” from a resolution that protects people from arbitrary executions. In other words, the UN General Assembly this week voted to allow LGBT people to be executed without cause.//

The US was one of the countries that voted against it, to their credit, but how in the world...I don't even know. These people here...

I didn't know God was a member of the UN General Assembly. I don't know which countries voted against, but I'm will to bet they are not all theocracies. I'm thinking many of the African nations may have voted against, among others, for homophobic reasons, not religious ones.

The UN needs to sort itself out. I am no longer impressed by what they stand far. That shouldn't even have been a Resolution.

Originally Posted by kayb

The member states are all equal and they get to propose whatever resolutions they want or debate whatever resolutions they want, so the individual states who vote for these things are the problem.

And the US is a big part of the problem, actually. For one thing, they previously refused to sign on to the Dutch-French declaration proposed to the UN that would have protected gays from criminal penalties and were the last western nation to agree to do so. Also, US preachers have been flooding Africa with very strong anti-gay rhetoric and incitement to hatred and encouraging this kind of behaviour in a very neo-colonial way. I've noticed this in the Caribbean too.

Furthermore, a lot of countries still have the death penalty for a lot of things, but thankfully that number gets smaller every year. The US still does some pretty arbitrary executions itself so again doesn't really have moral grounds to speak against other countries' execution practices. There isn't yet an international consensus against the death penalty so international law or the UN can't do much about it.

Get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me. -Muhammad Ali